Review: Fly Far Away From Lair

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Review: Fly Far Away From Lair

If you're looking for a game to justify your purchase of the $600 PlayStation 3, rest assured that Lair is not it. Although the premise (fly a dragon through a war-torn medieval world and take down your enemies with your flaming breath and razor-sharp claws) is enticing, the execution is so sloppy and unsatisfying that it makes for a thoroughly unfun videogame.

The first and biggest mistake that Lair's designers made is to require the use of the PlayStation 3's motion control. It's an exercise in frustration just trying to get your dragon to go where you want him to. It's probably great watching someone play Lair as they flail around like an idiot and are inevitably reduced to letting loose a volley of curse words at the screen, usually around the thirtieth time the game mistakes the controller gesture for "turn 180 degrees" for the one that means "zoom uncontrollably forward into the danger I was trying to get away from."

But even if the controls were perfect, Lair would still be confusing. While I am not so much of a purist as to insist that my dragons be colored bright green, I at least expect that they not be the exact same color as the background. Flying a leather-brown dragon through stage after stage of leather-brown mountains is the very definition of "low visibility."

And even when you can pick out what is your character and what isn't, your mission objectives are never quite clear. You might have to firebomb a series of catapults along a river so they don't take down your cargo ships. But you can't really see where the catapults are. Then, when you find them, you can't quite get your dragon to get near them. Then you fail the mission and have to start over. Playing through the later levels once is boring; playing them again because you died is agonizing.